There have been significant advances in creating visually immersive virtual environments in recent years. These advances have resulted in the widespread uptake of massively multi-player role-playing games, in which participants can enter a common virtual environment (such as a battlefield) and are represented in the virtual environment by an avatar, which is typically in the form of an animated character. In the case of a virtual environment in the form of a battle field that avatar could be of a soldier.
The widespread uptake of visually immersive virtual environments is due in part to significant advances in image processing technology that enables highly detailed and realistic graphics virtual environment to be generated. The proliferation of three-dimensional sound cards provides the ability to supply participants in a virtual environment with high quality sound. However, despite the prolific use of three-dimensional sound cards today's visually immersive virtual environments are generally unable to provide realistic mechanisms for participants to communicate with each other. Many environments use non-immersive communication mechanisms such as text based chat or walkie-talkie style voice.